Chapter 17 #2
At one point, while Miss Darcy was exclaiming over a delightfully tiny frog in the hedgerow, Elizabeth glanced at Mr Darcy and found him watching his sister with an expression so unguarded she felt she had no business seeing it.
Something between pride and tenderness and what she could only call relief, as though Georgiana’s uncomplicated happiness in that moment was the best thing he had seen in some time.
Elizabeth looked back at the hedgerow and thought about it for the rest of the walk.
She had seen brothers affectionate toward sisters before. Jane and Lydia had always inspired a degree of protectiveness in her father when he chose to exert himself, and she had known families in Meryton where the attachment between siblings was obvious.
This felt different. There was nothing performative about it.
Mr Darcy seemed entirely unaware of displaying anything at all.
Had anyone asked, Elizabeth suspected he would have denied being particularly demonstrative.
Yet his attention never wandered far from Georgiana.
He noticed her silences. He noticed her smiles.
He seemed perpetually aware of whether she was comfortable, happy, or ill at ease.
It was difficult to reconcile such careful affection with the picture she had once accepted so readily. More difficult than she wished.
On the next morning he came alone, and on the following as well.
Their conversations ranged widely. Books, and whether a person could deduce the character of a county from the quality of its spring, and the difference between being reserved and being private, which Mr Darcy appeared to have thought about in some depth and which turned into a longer exchange than Elizabeth had anticipated.
He had views that surprised her, and he listened to hers with the full attention of someone who is interested.
She found herself thinking about what he said long after she had returned to the parsonage, turning sentences over while she helped Charlotte with household matters or sat in the parlour in the evenings trying to read.
One morning the conversation drifted, as conversations sometimes do, toward family. Elizabeth could not have explained how it happened. One moment they were discussing Longbourn, and the next she found herself speaking of her father.
Not everything. Not the full weight of it. Yet considerably more than she had intended.
“We have not heard from him since autumn.”
Mr Darcy looked at her. “At all?”
She shook her head. “No letters. No explanation. Nothing.”
For a moment he said nothing. “That must be difficult.”
Elizabeth laughed softly. “Difficult is certainly one word for it.”
She expected questions after that. Most people asked questions.
Some from curiosity, others from kindness, and a few merely because silence made them uncomfortable.
Mr Darcy did none of those things. Instead, he listened.
She found herself telling him more than she had planned.
That Jane had carried most of the burden, that her mother alternated between despair and optimism, that Longbourn had continued because there was no alternative.
The account sounded oddly reasonable when spoken aloud. It had not felt reasonable while living through it.
When she finally stopped speaking, Mr Darcy remained silent for several moments. “I am sorry, Miss Elizabeth. More sorry than I can say.”
Nothing more. No advice or assurances. No attempt to improve the situation. Only the simple acknowledgement that it was difficult and that he regretted it.
The conversation moved on afterward. Yet Elizabeth found herself thinking about it repeatedly over the next two days. Not because of what he had said, but because of what he had not.
She also thought, during those two days, about Mr Wickham. The thinking had not become easier. It had, if anything, become more uncomfortable the longer she spent time with Mr Darcy.
Once, she had believed Mr Wickham immediately and completely.
Elizabeth kept coming back to that. She had believed him before he had said anything that could actually be checked.
He was charming and told his story well, and because his account had confirmed what she had already decided about Mr Darcy.
It is very comfortable to have your existing conclusions confirmed, and so she had not asked a single careful question.
She had simply believed him because it was convenient to believe him.
That was not good judgment. She disliked admitting it, and she admitted it anyway, because she had always believed that if you could not be honest about yourself, you could not be honest about anything.
She needed the other side of the account. Someone who had known both men from the inside and could tell her what had happened, not the carefully arranged version offered to a parlour audience.
One morning, Elizabeth arrived at the south lane to find him already there, standing at the bend with his hands behind his back, looking out over the fields. He turned when he heard her.
Georgiana had stayed at Rosings with a headache, and without her easy presence between them, the walk was quieter, more deliberate.
Elizabeth was more aware of what she said and suspected he was too.
The conversation was pleasant, but moved with a kind of care that the other mornings had not required.
They walked to the end of the lane and back. She told him she had been reading a novel Charlotte had recommended, and he asked about it. They talked about it for longer than the book probably merited.
She asked whether Pemberley was much changed in recent years, because Miss Darcy had mentioned some improvements.
He described the works being undertaken with surprising warmth, and as Elizabeth listened, she found a picture assembling itself in her mind of a place that was genuinely loved, not merely kept up.
At the fork in the lane, he stopped. “I hope the rest of your visit will be pleasant, Miss Bennet.”
“I have every reason to think it will be.” She paused. “When it is time for me to go, I shall miss walking with your sister. Please tell her so.”
“She will miss it, too.” Something in his expression shifted briefly. “She has been happier this spring than I expected. I think the walks have had a good deal to do with that.”
Elizabeth looked at him. In the morning light his face was open in the way it became only when he was talking about Georgiana, the reserve he wore everywhere else briefly set aside. “I am glad,” she said. “She is easy to be fond of.”
“She is.” He said it as a simple fact, which made Elizabeth smile. Then something settled back into place, and he was reserved again. He bowed. “A pleasant day to you then, Miss Bennet.”
“And to you as well, Mr Darcy.” With that, she turned toward the parsonage.
She made it around the first bend before she let herself know, plainly and without dressing it up, that she did not want to go.
That the feeling had been building gradually.
She had been calling it something else, confusion or uncertainty or simple curiosity, but it was none of those things.
It was the clearest feeling she had, and she had been refusing to look at it directly.
The realisation ought to have simplified matters.
Instead, it complicated them further. Once, she had believed she understood Mr Darcy.
She had an explanation for him, neatly arranged and entirely satisfactory.
Now she had none at all. The man she had met in Kent bore little resemblance to the man who had taken her safely to London and then disappeared, and that man had little resemblance to the villain she had once imagined.
Yet she could not simply dismiss Mr Wickham’s account because she wished to think well of its subject.
Somewhere between the two stood the truth.
Elizabeth found herself wanting to know what it was.
Having walked back to the parsonage, Elizabeth marched to the desk in her guest room and sat herself down.
She wrote to Jane about the hawthorn and the beauty of the spring in Kent, which was true and only that.
She said nothing about morning lanes or about the expression on a man’s face when he talks about his sister as though she is the most important person in any room.
She could hardly tell Jane what she did not yet understand herself.